Columbia Pictures may have the film rights to Spiderman, but they--apparently--don't have the TV rights to the character. For there is an animated Spiderman TV series called "The Ultimate Spiderman," which is produced by Film Roman Productions/Marvel Animation and distributed by Disney XD on the cable TV channel Disney XD, which is aimed at boys 6 to 14.

And I keep hearing that the Marvel characters, or, at least, some of them will start appearing at the Disney theme parks, both here and overseas, sometime next year, except at Walt Disney World, as Universal has the exclusive rights, the theme park rights, to that part of Florida.

At least Columbia Pictures was smart enough to maintain the rights to distribute the Spiderman film. Unlike Paramount who produced "The Avengers" film with Marvel, but whose film was distributed by the Walt Disney Company, who, as I heard, got 53% of the worldwide gross of the boxoffice, right off the top or so far over $700 million dollars just for distributing it.

Of course, all this may be moot, as I have heard all rights or most of the rights to the Marvel characters revert back to Marvel in two years.

When it comes to rights, who has 'em, who doesn't have 'em, who will have 'em, who won't have 'em, I think Shakespeare said it best: "What fools these mortals be."

The action scenes were superb but throughout I would suddenly remember that they were being done with CGI, and I found myself trying to discern what was CG and what was not.

One thing that IS interesting is how much of this film was clearly done practically. Well, at least done with live actors in front of a green screen. Really a lot of the web slinging in this one was actually shot with real people, and a lot of the lizard fighting was mocapped by Rhys Ifans. It does actually pay off a bit - things seem much more weighted and believable than in the Raimi films. That said, I don't think the action scenes are as good, because Raimi is actually a really good action director.

Overall, I thought this one was OK. Personally, I think it would have made a far more interesting trilogy if the Lizard's plan had succeeded. Maybe someone will write a comic where that happens.

Several plot holes though, and the change in the backstory with Uncle Ben is mindblowingly bad.

**SPOILERS**

They changed it from Peter being able to easily intervene and do the right thing, which would have saved Uncle Ben, to MAYBE being able to POSSIBLY have intervened, to stop Uncle Ben from getting HIMSELF killed. This is a really stupid change, obviously.

This one didn't have the heart or the fun of the raimi film. The villain was also better in the raimi film, he had a plan, a personality; unlike the mindless monster in this one. The raimi one had an overall theme about heroism which this one lacked. The only thing I liked better in this version was Emma as Gwen Stacy was alot better then Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane.